Re: [Fis] The Information Flow
they and the colleagues at Wuhan are the best situated to try to respond institutionally to the above challenge. My special greetings to all the Chinese FIS friends! - Mensaje original - De: Koichiro Matsuno cxq02...@nifty.com Fecha: Sábado, 3 de Noviembre de 2012, 6:11 am Asunto: Re: [Fis] The Information Flow A: fis@listas.unizar.es Folks, Bob U said The foundations, they are trembling! I have taken it to imply that propositional calculus itself is also in a bad shape. This observation reminds me of the hanging paradox first invented by an American logician Arthur Prior more than 60 years ago. It goes like this: On a certain Saturday a judge sentenced a man to be hanged on Sunday or Monday at noon, stipulating at the same time that the man would not know the day of his hanging until the morning of the day itself. The condemned man argued that if he were hanged on Monday, he would be aware of the fact by noon on Sunday, and this would contravene the judge's stipulation. So the date of his hanging would have to be Sunday. Since, however, he had worked this out on Saturday, and so knew the date of his hanging the day before, the judge's stipulation was again contravened. The date, therefore, could not be Sunday either. The prisoner concluded that he would not be hanged at all. However, the official gazette issued on Tuesday reported that the man was hanged on last Sunday. The logician-prisoner (the externalist) was right in his deduction upon the trusted propositional calculus, while the judge (the internalist) was also right in faithfully executing the sentence. But both cannot be right at the same time. Despite that, the internalist could finally come to preside over this empirical world. I had a hard time to convince myself of it. Strange? Cheers, Koichiro Matsuno ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
Re: [Fis] The Information Flow
system, it does not matter where and by whom, and little by little expand the initial stronghold with the collective support of all of us. There is a terrific collection of individualities and scholars in the FIS enterprise and the germane entities, so that any small oficializing attempt should prosper quite soon. Let us think about that... there is hope for non-trembling foundations! Provided we are institutionally clever. best wishes ---Pedro PS. by the way, I would like to hear in this list from our flamboyant Beijing FIS Group, as without discussion they and the colleagues at Wuhan are the best situated to try to respond institutionally to the above challenge. My special greetings to all the Chinese FIS friends! - Mensaje original - De: Koichiro Matsuno cxq02...@nifty.com Fecha: Sábado, 3 de Noviembre de 2012, 6:11 am Asunto: Re: [Fis] The Information Flow A: fis@listas.unizar.es Folks, Bob U said The foundations, they are trembling! I have taken it to imply that propositional calculus itself is also in a bad shape. This observation reminds me of the hanging paradox first invented by an American logician Arthur Prior more than 60 years ago. It goes like this: On a certain Saturday a judge sentenced a man to be hanged on Sunday or Monday at noon, stipulating at the same time that the man would not know the day of his hanging until the morning of the day itself. The condemned man argued that if he were hanged on Monday, he would be aware of the fact by noon on Sunday, and this would contravene the judge's stipulation. So the date of his hanging would have to be Sunday. Since, however, he had worked this out on Saturday, and so knew the date of his hanging the day before, the judge's stipulation was again contravened. The date, therefore, could not be Sunday either. The prisoner concluded that he would not be hanged at all. However, the official gazette issued on Tuesday reported that the man was hanged on last Sunday. The logician-prisoner (the externalist) was right in his deduction upon the trusted propositional calculus, while the judge (the internalist) was also right in faithfully executing the sentence. But both cannot be right at the same time. Despite that, the internalist could finally come to preside over this empirical world. I had a hard time to convince myself of it. Strange? Cheers, Koichiro Matsuno ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
Re: [Fis] The Information Flow
the problematic claims at the core of mechanical ways of explanation, as some (many?) of them refer to the information stuff: unlimited communication (even between physical elements), arbitrary partitions and boundary conditions, ideal status of the acting laws of nature, ominiscient observer, idealized nature of human knowledge (no neurodynamics of knowledge), disciplinary hierarchies versus heterarchical interrelationships, logical versus social construction and knowledge recombination, idealized social information, etc.etc. Probably I have misconceived and wrongly expressed some of those problems, but in any case it is unfortunate that there is a dense feedback among them and a strong entrenchment with many others, so the revision task becomes Herculean even if partially addressed. The big problem some of us see, and I tried to argument about that in the last Beijing FIS meeting, is that without an entrance of some partial aspect in the professional science system, none of the those challenges has the slightest possibility of being developed in the amateur mode/marginal science our studies are caught into. Therefore a common challenge for FIS, the new ISIS society, ITHEA, Symmetrion, INBIOSA, etc. is to take some piece or problem, with practical implications, and enter it into the institutional system, it does not matter where and by whom, and little by little expand the initial stronghold with the collective support of all of us. There is a terrific collection of individualities and scholars in the FIS enterprise and the germane entities, so that any small oficializing attempt should prosper quite soon. Let us think about that... there is hope for non-trembling foundations! Provided we are institutionally clever. best wishes ---Pedro PS. by the way, I would like to hear in this list from our flamboyant Beijing FIS Group, as without discussion they and the colleagues at Wuhan are the best situated to try to respond institutionally to the above challenge. My special greetings to all the Chinese FIS friends! - Mensaje original - De: Koichiro Matsuno cxq02...@nifty.com Fecha: Sábado, 3 de Noviembre de 2012, 6:11 am Asunto: Re: [Fis] The Information Flow A: fis@listas.unizar.es Folks, Bob U said The foundations, they are trembling! I have taken it to imply that propositional calculus itself is also in a bad shape. This observation reminds me of the hanging paradox first invented by an American logician Arthur Prior more than 60 years ago. It goes like this: On a certain Saturday a judge sentenced a man to be hanged on Sunday or Monday at noon, stipulating at the same time that the man would not know the day of his hanging until the morning of the day itself. The condemned man argued that if he were hanged on Monday, he would be aware of the fact by noon on Sunday, and this would contravene the judge's stipulation. So the date of his hanging would have to be Sunday. Since, however, he had worked this out on Saturday, and so knew the date of his hanging the day before, the judge's stipulation was again contravened. The date, therefore, could not be Sunday either. The prisoner concluded that he would not be hanged at all. However, the official gazette issued on Tuesday reported that the man was hanged on last Sunday. The logician-prisoner (the externalist) was right in his deduction upon the trusted propositional calculus, while the judge (the internalist) was also right in faithfully executing the sentence. But both cannot be right at the same time. Despite that, the internalist could finally come to preside over this empirical world. I had a hard time to convince myself of it. Strange? Cheers, Koichiro Matsuno ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis __ Robert K. Logan Chief Scientist - sLab at OCAD Prof. Emeritus - Physics - U. of Toronto www.physics.utoronto.ca/Members/logan ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
Re: [Fis] The Information Flow
Tuesday, November 13, 2012, 3:57:10 PM, Bob wrote: ... But for me the interesting phenomena where the logic of cause and effect does not hold is the case of emergence and self-organization. With an emergent system in which the properties of the system can not be derived from, reduced to or predicted from the properties of the components the notion of cause and effect does not hold. The reductionist program of logical thinking does not do much to understand emergent phenomena. It is not that logic is wrong it is that it is irrelevant. So if one is an emergentist one cannot be a mechanist. That is simple logic. ;-) Don't know if I'm an emergentist or not. On one hand, I do not believe in the cannot be derived from, reduced to or predicted from condition because it seems intrinsically subjective, perhaps even circular. But on the other hand I do believe that complex systems are generally just as real and just as significant as their components, higher level explanations being generally just as good as lower level ones, and only the purpose for which the explanation is required determines which level is most appropriate. I also believe that causation can only be considered to occur horizontally, along levels of explanation. That is because causation is inherently temporal, effects following causes, and there is no passage of time in vertical forays into higher or lower levels of description/explanation. There is no vertical causation. However, I do consider myself a mechanist, because as I see it, one high level event can always be decomposed into a number of lower level events, and eventually, if the process is repeated, a level will be reached at which all of the events can be clearly understood as mechanical. The lower level ones do not CAUSE the highest level one, because they are occurring simultaneously, but they COMPOSE it, and there is no mysterious other element to it. Having said which, if the high level event is to be causally explained, other events on the same level will have to be involved in the explanation, a low level story will NOT do the job. So I believe I've reconciled emergence with mechanism, but I suspect that whether you agree with me depends on what you consider to be essential to emergence. Or how strongly you feel about mechanism. Or, of course, maybe I've just made a silly mistake. :) (Some say that levels of description/explanation are not real (Don Ross?), and I don't know whether that's a reasonable thing to say or not, but they're certainly indispensable to us.) -- Robin Faichney http://www.robinfaichney.org/ ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
Re: [Fis] The Information Flow
Dear Joseph and FIS colleagues, I will not argue here for or against computationalism (digital mechanism), because I do not understand how complex biological, cognitive and social processes can be computable, if no algorithm can be written for them. I speak of the processes themselves, not models of them.I would be grateful if someone (Bruno?) could explain this to me - I apologize if I have missed where this was done. (Joseph) It seems to me that the answer to Joseph's question is given in the following passage by Roger Penrose: (S)ome would prefer to define computation in terms of what a physical object can (in principle?) achieve (Deutsch, Teuscher, Bauer and Cooper). To me, however, this begs the question, and this same question certainly remains, whichever may be our preference concerning the use of the term computation. If we prefer to use this physical definition, then all physical systems compute by definition, and in that case we would simply need a different word for the (original Church-Turing) mathematical concept of computation, so that the profound question raised, concerning the perhaps computable nature of the laws governing the operation of the universe can be studied, and indeed questioned. Penrose in the Foreword to Zenil H. (Ed.): A Computable Universe, Understanding Computation Exploring Nature As Computation, World Scientific Publishing Company/Imperial College Press, (2012) In the field of Natural Computing the whole of nature computes. Nature is a network of networks of computing processes. For many of such processes there are no simple single algorithms (like for human mind which also is a process - a network of processes) There is a complex computational architecture and not a single algorithm. Nature indeed can be seen as a network of networks of computational processes and what we are trying is to compute the way nature does, learning its tricks of the trade. So the focus would not be computability but computational modeling. How good computational models of nature are we able to produce and what does it mean for a physical system to perform computation, computation being implementation of physical laws. From the Introduction to the book Computing Nature, forthcoming in SAPERE book series: http://www.mrtc.mdh.se/~gdc/work/COMPUTING-NATURE-20121028.pdf In a computing nature complex biological, cognitive and social processes are (naturally) computable, even if no algorithm can be written for them. But then computable is a more general term, as Penrose points out. With best regards, Gordana From: fis-boun...@listas.unizar.es [mailto:fis-boun...@listas.unizar.es] On Behalf Of Joseph Brenner Sent: den 13 november 2012 18:24 To: Bob Logan; Stanley N Salthe Cc: fis Subject: Re: [Fis] The Information Flow Dear FIS Friends and Colleagues, Sometimes I feel as if I have been whistling Dixie, to use an American expression for futility, for the last four years. I have tried to call attention to the fact that there is at least one way of doing logic, that of Stéphane Lupasco as up-dated in my Logic in Reality (LIR), that is not bounded by linguistic constraints, but allows one to make inferences about the real states of a system, actual and potential. LIR is thus a logic that is relevant to the discussion, offering a considerably more complex picture of causality than a simple reversal of cause and effect. Ditto for emergence. It is thus a new but still rigorous, if partly qualitative way of mediating certainly philosophical and some scientific efforts, for example information-as-process. I will not argue here for or against computationalism (digital mechanism), because I do not understand how complex biological, cognitive and social processes can be computable, if no algorithm can be written for them. I speak of the processes themselves, not models of them. I would be grateful if someone (Bruno?) could explain this to me - I apologize if I have missed where this was done. A contrario, if anyone does not understand Logic in Reality, I would be happy to send some references that explain it. This might make possible its inclusion in the discussion. Thank you and best wishes, Joseph - Original Message - From: Bob Loganmailto:lo...@physics.utoronto.ca To: Stanley N Salthemailto:ssal...@binghamton.edu Cc: fismailto:fis@listas.unizar.es Sent: Tuesday, November 13, 2012 4:57 PM Subject: Re: [Fis] The Information Flow Hey Stan - I agree with the way you characterize the role of logic as a linguistic mechanism. Logic connects one set of statements, the premises, with another set of statements, the conclusion. Without challenging your remarks I would suggest that like the case with the poets it is sometimes useful to set aside the dictates of logic. McLuhan talked about the reversal of cause and effect. By this he meant in the case of artists that they start with the effect they wish to create and then find the causes
Re: [Fis] The Information Flow
Dear Pedro, Dear FIS Colleagues, Thanks Pedro for his assigning FIS Beijing Group to respond the current FIS topic about Information Flow, to my knowledge, there are about 20 books published about this question, but I only contacted a few of them, the following three have gave me deep impressions: 1. Concepts of Molecular Genetics: Information Flow in Genetics and Evolution (McGraw-Hill, 1977), by Dow Woodward Val Woodward. 2. Knowledge and the flow of information (MIT Press, 1981), by Fred I. Dretske. 3. Communications flows: a census in the United States and Japan (North-Holland, 1984), by Ithiel de Sola Pool [et al.]. All these researches employed the term of information flow in Genetics, Philosophy, and Mass Communication respectively, but they aren’t the true study about (information) flow. As we know, flow is a metaphorical term borrowed from Mechanics, so all the Information Flow explorations should discuss in statistics or mathematics. If someone only treat the communication of information as an abstract flow, sorry, this only is a metaphor. These studies about information flow especially occurred in Management Science, Computer Science, and Telecommunication very often. So, my opinion is, maybe the topic information flow is very promising, but we should at least catch on every FLOW in different professional fields respectively first, don't worry！ Best wishes, Yan Xueshan Peking University, FIS Beijing Group _ From: fis-boun...@listas.unizar.es [mailto:fis-boun...@listas.unizar.es] On Behalf Of fis-requ...@listas.unizar.es Sent: Monday, November 12, 2012 1:00 AM To: fis@listas.unizar.es Subject: fis Digest, Vol 565, Issue 3 Send fis mailing list submissions to fis@listas.unizar.es To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to fis-requ...@listas.unizar.es You can reach the person managing the list at fis-ow...@listas.unizar.es When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than Re: Contents of fis digest... Today's Topics: 1. Re: The Information Flow (PEDRO CLEMENTE MARIJUAN FERNANDEZ) -- Message: 1 Date: Sun, 11 Nov 2012 14:00:03 +0100 From: PEDRO CLEMENTE MARIJUAN FERNANDEZ pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es Subject: Re: [Fis] The Information Flow To: fis@listas.unizar.es Message-ID: fbcbe4a4624e.509fa...@aragon.es Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Dear colleagues, Yes, the foundations are trembling... as usual during quite long a time. Maybe too many aspects have to be put into line in order to have new, more consistent foundations for human knowledge. Until now the different crisis of Mechanics, the dominant scientific culture, have been solved at the small price of leaving conceptual inconsistencies until the rug of brand new fields or subdisciplines while at the same time fictive claims of unity of sceince, reductionism, etc. were upheld. Good for mechanics, as probably there were few competing options around --if any. Bad for the whole human knowledge, as multidisciplinary schizophrenia has been assumed as the natural state of mental health. My opinion is that information science should carefully examine the problematic claims at the core of mechanical ways of explanation, as some (many?) of them refer to the information stuff: unlimited communication (even between physical elements), arbitrary partitions and boundary conditions, ideal status of the acting laws of nature, ominiscient observer, idealized nature of human knowledge (no neurodynamics of knowledge), disciplinary hierarchies versus heterarchical interrelationships, logical versus social construction and knowledge recombination, idealized social information, etc.etc. Probably I have misconceived and wrongly expressed some of those problems, but in any case it is unfortunate that there is a dense feedback among them and a strong entrenchment with many others, so the revision task becomes Herculean even if partially addressed. The big problem some of us see, and I tried to argument about that in the last Beijing FIS meeting, is that without an entrance of some partial aspect in the professional science system, none of the those challenges has the slightest possibility of being developed in the amateur mode/marginal science our studies are caught into. Therefore a common challenge for FIS, the new ISIS society, ITHEA, Symmetrion, INBIOSA, etc. is to take some piece or problem, with practical implications, and enter it into the institutional system, it does not matter where and by whom, and little by little expand the initial stronghold with the collective support of all of us. There is a terrific collection of individualities and scholars in the FIS enterprise and the germane
Re: [Fis] The Information Flow
Dear Pedro, Roman Littlefield is coming out with a volume along those lines entitled Beyond Mechanism http://www.academia.edu/1141907/Beyond_Mechanism_Putting_Life_Back_Into_Biology As for our Chinese colleagues, I find them more open to non-mechanical scenarios than are anglophones. All three of my books are being translated into Chinese. The first one, Growth and Development: Ecosystems Phenomenology has already been published. The best to all, Bob Quoting PEDRO CLEMENTE MARIJUAN FERNANDEZ pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es: Dear colleagues, Yes, the foundations are trembling... as usual during quite long a time. Maybe too many aspects have to be put into line in order to have new, more consistent foundations for human knowledge. Until now the different crisis of Mechanics, the dominant scientific culture, have been solved at the small price of leaving conceptual inconsistencies until the rug of brand new fields or subdisciplines while at the same time fictive claims of unity of sceince, reductionism, etc. were upheld. Good for mechanics, as probably there were few competing options around --if any. Bad for the whole human knowledge, as multidisciplinary schizophrenia has been assumed as the natural state of mental health. My opinion is that information science should carefully examine the problematic claims at the core of mechanical ways of explanation, as some (many?) of them refer to the information stuff: unlimited communication (even between physical elements), arbitrary partitions and boundary conditions, ideal status of the acting laws of nature, ominiscient observer, idealized nature of human knowledge (no neurodynamics of knowledge), disciplinary hierarchies versus heterarchical interrelationships, logical versus social construction and knowledge recombination, idealized social information, etc.etc. Probably I have misconceived and wrongly expressed some of those problems, but in any case it is unfortunate that there is a dense feedback among them and a strong entrenchment with many others, so the revision task becomes Herculean even if partially addressed. The big problem some of us see, and I tried to argument about that in the last Beijing FIS meeting, is that without an entrance of some partial aspect in the professional science system, none of the those challenges has the slightest possibility of being developed in the amateur mode/marginal science our studies are caught into. Therefore a common challenge for FIS, the new ISIS society, ITHEA, Symmetrion, INBIOSA, etc. is to take some piece or problem, with practical implications, and enter it into the institutional system, it does not matter where and by whom, and little by little expand the initial stronghold with the collective support of all of us. There is a terrific collection of individualities and scholars in the FIS enterprise and the germane entities, so that any small oficializing attempt should prosper quite soon. Let us think about that... there is hope for non-trembling foundations! Provided we are institutionally clever. best wishes ---Pedro PS. by the way, I would like to hear in this list from our flamboyant Beijing FIS Group, as without discussion they and the colleagues at Wuhan are the best situated to try to respond institutionally to the above challenge. My special greetings to all the Chinese FIS friends! - Mensaje original - De: Koichiro Matsuno cxq02...@nifty.com Fecha: Sábado, 3 de Noviembre de 2012, 6:11 am Asunto: Re: [Fis] The Information Flow A: fis@listas.unizar.es Folks, Bob U said The foundations, they are trembling! I have taken it to imply that propositional calculus itself is also in a bad shape. This observation reminds me of the hanging paradox first invented by an American logician Arthur Prior more than 60 years ago. It goes like this: On a certain Saturday a judge sentenced a man to be hanged on Sunday or Monday at noon, stipulating at the same time that the man would not know the day of his hanging until the morning of the day itself. The condemned man argued that if he were hanged on Monday, he would be aware of the fact by noon on Sunday, and this would contravene the judge's stipulation. So the date of his hanging would have to be Sunday. Since, however, he had worked this out on Saturday, and so knew the date of his hanging the day before, the judge's stipulation was again contravened. The date, therefore, could not be Sunday either. The prisoner concluded that he would not be hanged at all. However, the official gazette issued on Tuesday reported that the man was hanged on last Sunday. The logician-prisoner (the externalist) was right in his deduction upon the trusted propositional calculus, while the judge (the internalist) was also right in faithfully executing the sentence. But both cannot
Re: [Fis] The Information Flow
Dear colleagues, Yes, the foundations are trembling... as usual during quite long a time. Maybe too many aspects have to be put into line in order to have new, more consistent foundations for human knowledge. Until now the different crisis of Mechanics, the dominant scientific culture, have been solved at the small price of leaving conceptual inconsistencies until the rug of brand new fields or subdisciplines while at the same time fictive claims of unity of sceince, reductionism, etc. were upheld. Good for mechanics, as probably there were few competing options around --if any. Bad for the whole human knowledge, as multidisciplinary schizophrenia has been assumed as the natural state of mental health. My opinion is that information science should carefully examine the problematic claims at the core of mechanical ways of explanation, as some (many?) of them refer to the information stuff: unlimited communication (even between physical elements), arbitrary partitions and boundary conditions, ideal status of the acting laws of nature, ominiscient observer, idealized nature of human knowledge (no neurodynamics of knowledge), disciplinary hierarchies versus heterarchical interrelationships, logical versus social construction and knowledge recombination, idealized social information, etc.etc. Probably I have misconceived and wrongly expressed some of those problems, but in any case it is unfortunate that there is a dense feedback among them and a strong entrenchment with many others, so the revision task becomes Herculean even if partially addressed. The big problem some of us see, and I tried to argument about that in the last Beijing FIS meeting, is that without an entrance of some partial aspect in the professional science system, none of the those challenges has the slightest possibility of being developed in the amateur mode/marginal science our studies are caught into. Therefore a common challenge for FIS, the new ISIS society, ITHEA, Symmetrion, INBIOSA, etc. is to take some piece or problem, with practical implications, and enter it into the institutional system, it does not matter where and by whom, and little by little expand the initial stronghold with the collective support of all of us. There is a terrific collection of individualities and scholars in the FIS enterprise and the germane entities, so that any small oficializing attempt should prosper quite soon. Let us think about that... there is hope for non-trembling foundations! Provided we are institutionally clever. best wishes ---Pedro PS. by the way, I would like to hear in this list from our flamboyant Beijing FIS Group, as without discussion they and the colleagues at Wuhan are the best situated to try to respond institutionally to the above challenge. My special greetings to all the Chinese FIS friends! - Mensaje original - De: Koichiro Matsuno cxq02...@nifty.com Fecha: Sábado, 3 de Noviembre de 2012, 6:11 am Asunto: Re: [Fis] The Information Flow A: fis@listas.unizar.es Folks, Bob U said The foundations, they are trembling! I have taken it to imply that propositional calculus itself is also in a bad shape. This observation reminds me of the hanging paradox first invented by an American logician Arthur Prior more than 60 years ago. It goes like this: On a certain Saturday a judge sentenced a man to be hanged on Sunday or Monday at noon, stipulating at the same time that the man would not know the day of his hanging until the morning of the day itself. The condemned man argued that if he were hanged on Monday, he would be aware of the fact by noon on Sunday, and this would contravene the judge's stipulation. So the date of his hanging would have to be Sunday. Since, however, he had worked this out on Saturday, and so knew the date of his hanging the day before, the judge's stipulation was again contravened. The date, therefore, could not be Sunday either. The prisoner concluded that he would not be hanged at all. However, the official gazette issued on Tuesday reported that the man was hanged on last Sunday. The logician-prisoner (the externalist) was right in his deduction upon the trusted propositional calculus, while the judge (the internalist) was also right in faithfully executing the sentence. But both cannot be right at the same time. Despite that, the internalist could finally come to preside over this empirical world. I had a hard time to convince myself of it. Strange? Cheers, Koichiro Matsuno ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
Re: [Fis] The Information Flow - Transcending the Turing Limit
From Bruno: But the word mechanism cannot have the same sense before and after the discovery of the universal machine and its limitation. As my work illustrates in detail, universal machine have already two internal aspects which conflict with each other, and are close to the analytical/intuitive distinction. This suggests the need to transcend the Universal machine as articulated by Turing. It suggests the need for us to articulate a ultracomplex mechanism that is of a different variety. Otto Rossler in conversation with Seaman suggests the employment of transfinite numbers --- Cantor and transfinite accuracy This paper may be of interest: The motives behind Cantor's Set Theory - Physical, biological, and philosophical questions. http://personal.us.es/josef/Cantor.pdf Analogue mechanisms (or their highly parsed emulation in binary machines) might be one approach. See also: Neural Networks and Analog Computation: Beyond the Turing Limit Author: Hava T. Siegelmann The theoretical foundations of Neural Networks and Analog Computation conceptualize neural networks as a particular type of computer consisting of multiple assemblies of basic processors interconnected in an intricate structure. Examining these networks under various resource constraints reveals a continuum of computational devices, several of which coincide with well-known classical models. What emerges is a Church-Turing-like thesis, applied to the field of analog computation, which features the neural network model in place of the digital Turing machine. This new concept can serve as a point of departure for the development of alternative, supra-Turing computational theories. On a mathematical level, the treatment of neural computations enriches the theory of computation but also explicates the computational complexity associated with biological networks, adaptive engineering tools, and related models from the fields of control theory and nonlinear dynamics.[i] Segelmann states: “The surprising finding has been that when analog networks assume real weights, their power encompasses and transcends that of digital computers.”[ii] She goes on to say “our model captures nature's manifest “computation” of the future physical world from the present, in which constants that are not known to us, or cannot even be measured, do affect the evolution of the system.”[iii] [i] Siegelmann, H. (2007), Neural Networks and Analog Computation: Beyond the Turing Limit, http://www.cs.umass.edu/~hava/advertisement.html, Accessed 1 December 2009. See also Siegelmann, H (1999), Neural Networks and Analogue Computation, Beyond the Turing Limit, Boston, MA: Birkhäuser. [ii] Ibid. [iii] Ibid. Best Bill Seaman___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
Re: [Fis] The Information Flow
FIS friends, It is too big a challenge to respond to Joseph's and Bill's points. While thinking about their points (in slow thought mode) I will just make a couple of complementary remarks. First, following Gould's arguments on replaying life's tape, what would happen if we could replay the sciences' tape? Would we obtain a similar map of the sciences? Would we finally obtain the same ways of thinking visions of the world? I do not think so. Historically, we could have had a very different system of the sciences... when the East and the West discovered each other before the scientific revolution (medieval travels of Marco Polo and Ruiz de Clavijo) and later on during the Enlightenment, there was a curious situation of alternative paths followed by each World. Joseph Needham's work summarizes the respective stronger and weaker points. The point is that scientific trajectories have to be re-examined along the different epochs, motivated either by external happenstances or just by the inner dynamics. And this is a problem of our time concerning the massive social experiment with accelerated information flows. We lack scientific guidance on important parts of the process ---not just the technological wizard. The other point is about vindicating the convenience of mechanical thinking ---just for large domains of experience but not for tackling the general nature problems of information flows. It is in this sense that I was talking about the need of a sort of Heraclitean paradigm (well taken by Joseph)... About the completeness of the mechanical way of thinking, based on particles, forces (and fields), I remember I asked in this list about the laws of nature several years ago---where do they reside so that they can directly interact with matter? What materiality have themselves? Are they but disembodied information? I think the responses dovetail better with informational thinking, which is in fact what today prevails in cosmology and quantum information processing. Am afraid I have advanced little and just introduced more noise in the discussion! best wishes ---Pedro Challenge for FIS- What are your 10 most important questions? 1) How can we best explore the latest version of new means of scanning/observing the body? What are they? how are they mathematically intra-explored? 2) how can we best move from emergent systems to known systems? Transcending Rosen... 3) is there a new relational mathematics that moves across current spaces? Who is working now on this? How can we do it? 4) How can people best collaborate with different mind sets --- people that think differently?? Is this valuable? 5) How can we make new publishing arenas that explore and support transdisciplinary research? 6) How can we best bridge research fields in terms of mathematics? 7) How can we go beyond what we know in a quantum jump without having our past research being put into question? or should we just allow ourselves to change as we learn/absorb? 8) How can we make sure institutions are supporting such research in terms of tenure? 9) What is the best publishing venue for such research? 10) Who is best funding this… b Bill Seaman Professor, Department of Art, Art History Visual Studies DUKE UNIVERSITY 114 b East Duke Building Box 90764 Durham, NC 27708, USA +1-919-684-2499 http://billseaman.com/ http://fds.duke.edu/db/aas/AAH/faculty/william.seaman http://www.dibs.duke.edu/research/profiles/98-william-seaman RadioSeaman Paste into itunes (Advanced/open audio streams) for internet radio: http://smw-aux.trinity.duke.edu:8000/radioseaman On Oct 27, 2012, at 11:34 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be mailto:marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Even if the Parmenidean reality is restricted to the natural numbers, with only the laws of addition and multiplication, we can prove, assuming our brain are Turing emulable, that the view from inside as to be Heraclitean. The problem is not mechanism. The problem is the reductionist conception of mechanism. I think. The incompleteness phenomenon does not refute mechanism, like some have proposed, but it does refute the reductionist conception of mechanism. Arithmetic is full of life and dreams. Best, Bruno -- - Pedro C. Marijuán Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group Instituto Aragonés de Ciencias de la Salud Centro de Investigación Biomédica de Aragón (CIBA) Avda. San Juan Bosco, 13, planta X 50009 Zaragoza, Spain Tfno. +34 976 71 3526 ( 6818) pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/ - ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
Re: [Fis] The Information Flow
Quoting Pedro C. Marijuan pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es: First, following Gould's arguments on replaying life's tape, what would happen if we could replay the sciences' tape? Would we obtain a similar map of the sciences? Would we finally obtain the same ways of thinking visions of the world? I do not think so. Historically, we could have had a very different system of the sciences... when the East and the West discovered each other before the scientific revolution (medieval travels of Marco Polo and Ruiz de Clavijo) and later on during the Enlightenment, there was a curious situation of alternative paths followed by each World. Joseph Needham's work summarizes the respective stronger and weaker points. The point is that scientific trajectories have to be re-examined along the different epochs, motivated either by external happenstances or just by the inner dynamics. And this is a problem of our time concerning the massive social experiment with accelerated information flows. We lack scientific guidance on important parts of the process ---not just the technological wizard. Dear Pedro, I heartily concur! Folks have been concerned with the contingent nature of science for a while now. One of the most prominent was John A. Wheeler, who dreamed up a metaphor for the development of science that I have included in several of my publications: ** The development of science is like a game played by a number of guests at a dinner party. Waiting for dinner to be served, the guests elect to play the game 20 Questions the object of which is to guess a word. In Wheelers version, one individual is sent out of the room, while those who remain are to decide upon a particular word. It is explained to the delegated person that upon returning, he/she will question each of the group in turn and the responses must take the form of a simple, unadorned yes or no until the questioner guesses the word. After the designated player leaves the room, one of the guests suggests that the group not choose a word. Rather, when the subject returns and poses the first question, the initial respondent is completely free to answer yes or no on unfettered whimsy. Similarly, the second person is at liberty to make either reply. The only condition upon the second person is that his/her response may not contradict the first reply. The restriction upon the third respondent is that that individuals reply must not be dissonant with either of the first two answers, and so forth. The game ends when the subject asks, Is the word X? and the only response coherent with all previous replies is Yes. After Wheeler, John A. 1980. Beyond the black hole. Pp. 341-375 In: H. Woolf (Ed.) Some Strangeness in the Proportion. Reading, PA: Addison-Wesley. ** Now for a recent and more radical turn in this direction, I direct your attention to the work of historian of science, Ed Dellian http://www.neutonus-reformatus.com/frameset.html. Ed recently translated Principia from the Latin into German and discovered that most of the contemporary renditions of Newton's second law don't correspond to Newton's narrative. In particular, we generally quote his second law as f=ma. Newton, however, left off with a geometric and discrete version of the second law of the form (f/mv)=c, a constant. The continuous, algebraic versions of mechanical laws trace rather to Liebnitz and Euler as what Dellian calls Berliner Mechanik. Newton argued strenuously against this direction! Dellian further contends that by remaining with Newton's geometric stance one could have avoided the necessity of creating the separate disciplines of thermodynamics and quantum physics, so that physics would have remained a more unified whole. Ed's assertions caught my attention, because I have always been suspicious about the first law of thermodynamics (See p23ff in http://people.biology.ufl.edu/ulan/pubs/EcolAsc.htm.) I have since come to the conclusion that when the continuum assumption is valid, the classical algebraic laws perform brilliantly. When they do not, they become useless, if not misleading. In particular, Elsasser warned us of their inapplicability in the face of heterogeneity http://www.vordenker.de/elsasser/we_logic-biol.pdf. I have come to the conclusion that much of contemporary physics is dealing with la-la land and not reality. Take quantum entanglement, for example. Physicists would have us believe that an electron can be present in our lab or halfway across the universe, and will be resolved instantaneously upon measurement. Well, I can swallow entanglement within a space of say, 1,000 radii of an electron. But at macroscopic dimensions? Anyone who believes that fairy tale has never encountered the Buckingham-Pi Theorem (as most physicists
Re: [Fis] The Information Flow
On 02 Nov 2012, at 14:16, Pedro C. Marijuan wrote: FIS friends, It is too big a challenge to respond to Joseph's and Bill's points. While thinking about their points (in slow thought mode) I will just make a couple of complementary remarks. First, following Gould's arguments on replaying life's tape, what would happen if we could replay the sciences' tape? Would we obtain a similar map of the sciences? Would we finally obtain the same ways of thinking visions of the world? I do not think so. Historically, we could have had a very different system of the sciences... when the East and the West discovered each other before the scientific revolution (medieval travels of Marco Polo and Ruiz de Clavijo) and later on during the Enlightenment, there was a curious situation of alternative paths followed by each World. Joseph Needham's work summarizes the respective stronger and weaker points. The point is that scientific trajectories have to be re-examined along the different epochs, motivated either by external happenstances or just by the inner dynamics. And this is a problem of our time concerning the massive social experiment with accelerated information flows. We lack scientific guidance on important parts of the process ---not just the technological wizard. I think the futures are plural, but what you say might make sense for a notion of normal (in Guass sense) futures, but then it can depend at which scale level you will replay the tape. The other point is about vindicating the convenience of mechanical thinking ---just for large domains of experience but not for tackling the general nature problems of information flows. It is in this sense that I was talking about the need of a sort of Heraclitean paradigm (well taken by Joseph)... About the completeness of the mechanical way of thinking, based on particles, forces (and fields), I remember I asked in this list about the laws of nature several years ago---where do they reside so that they can directly interact with matter? What materiality have themselves? Are they but disembodied information? I think the responses dovetail better with informational thinking, which is in fact what today prevails in cosmology and quantum information processing. I sort of agree. I certainly agree with the spirit of what you say here. But the word mechanism cannot have the same sense before and after the discovery of the universal machine and its limitation. As my work illustrates in detail, universal machine have already two internal aspects which conflict with each other, and are close to the analytical/intuitive distinction. In a sense, no machine can believe analytically that she is a machine, and from her inner , first person perspective this happens to be true: the 1p of a machine is not possibly a machine from the machine 1p view. That is why I insist that mechanism, after Gödel and Turing appears to be a vaccine against reductionist thinking. Now there is a (big) price for this, which is that materialism get inconsistent (even the weak materialism which asserts only the existence of primitive matter). Eventually the appearance of matter has to be entirely justified by the coherence of the relative number dreams (dream = computations as seen by the computed person). So mechanism disallows a view of nature based on particles and forces. They have to be fictional mind construct to make locally sense of the experience lived in the artithmetical reality. Matter is not disembodied information, but first person plural (shared) subjective appearances in the coherent dreams of the numbers, or more exactly numbers relation with each other. Computationalism is used by materialist to put consciousness under the rug, but the fact is that materialism is simply incompatible with computationalism. There is no choice than to go back to Plato, or to abandon mechanism if we want to maintain Aristotle theology (like most materialist do, consciously or not). Am afraid I have advanced little and just introduced more noise in the discussion! Not at all. I personally find those points very important. It certainly gives me the opportunity to insist on something I have worked on for a very long time, and which is that mechanism itself forbids the mechanical reductionism. Sometimes I sum this by if my 3p I is a machine, then my 1p I is not a machine, from my 1p point of view. It makes mechanism into a relief for those who dislike reductionist thinking, especially around the communication and information studies. But then it makes us more ignorant than what many physicalists want us to believe. Indeed, now, the laws of physics got a non trivial origin, and they have evolved themselves in a space of numbers/machine dreams. This is far from the current aristotelian metaphysics assumed, not always consciously, by many scientists and philosophers alike. Best, Bruno
Re: [Fis] The Information Flow
Folks, Bob U said The foundations, they are trembling! I have taken it to imply that propositional calculus itself is also in a bad shape. This observation reminds me of the hanging paradox first invented by an American logician Arthur Prior more than 60 years ago. It goes like this: On a certain Saturday a judge sentenced a man to be hanged on Sunday or Monday at noon, stipulating at the same time that the man would not know the day of his hanging until the morning of the day itself. The condemned man argued that if he were hanged on Monday, he would be aware of the fact by noon on Sunday, and this would contravene the judge's stipulation. So the date of his hanging would have to be Sunday. Since, however, he had worked this out on Saturday, and so knew the date of his hanging the day before, the judge's stipulation was again contravened. The date, therefore, could not be Sunday either. The prisoner concluded that he would not be hanged at all. However, the official gazette issued on Tuesday reported that the man was hanged on last Sunday. The logician-prisoner (the externalist) was right in his deduction upon the trusted propositional calculus, while the judge (the internalist) was also right in faithfully executing the sentence. But both cannot be right at the same time. Despite that, the internalist could finally come to preside over this empirical world. I had a hard time to convince myself of it. Strange? Cheers, Koichiro Matsuno ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
Re: [Fis] The Information Flow
On 26 Oct 2012, at 22:32, PEDRO CLEMENTE MARIJUAN FERNANDEZ wrote:
Dear FISers,
Is it interesting the discussion on wether those informational
entities contain realizations of the Aristotelian scheme of
causality or not?
The cell, in my view, conspicuously fails --it would be too
artifactual an scheme. Some parts of the sensory paths of advanced
nervous systems seem to separate some of those causes --but only in
a few parts or patches of the concerned pathway. For instance, in
visual processing the what and the how/where seem to be
travelling together undifferentiated along the optic nerve and are
separated --more or less-- after the visual superior colliculus in
the midbrain before discharging onto the visual cortex. The really
big flow of spikes arriving each instant (many millions every few
milisec) are mixed and correlated with themselves and with other top-
down and bottom-up preexisting flows in multiple neural mappings...
and further, when those flows mix with the association areas under
the influence of languaje, then, and only then, all those logic and
conceptual categorizations of human thought are enacted in the
ephemeral synaptic networks.
I am optimistic that a new Heraclitean way of thinking boils down
in network science, neuroinformatics, systems biology,
bioinformation etc. Neither the Parmenidean eliminative fixism of
classical reductionists, nor the Aristotelian organicism of
systemicists. Say that this is a caricature. However you cannot
bathe twice in the same river not just because we all are caught
into the universal physical flow of photons and forces, but for the
Heraclitean flux of our own neurons and brains, for the inner
torrents of the aggregated information flows. The same for whatever
cells, societies, etc. and their physical structures for info
transportation.
Either we produce an interesting new vision of the world, finally
making sense of those perennial metaphors among the different
(informational) realms, or information science will continue to be
that small portion of incoherent patches more or less close to
information theory or to artificial intelligence. In spite of
decades of bla-bla- about information revolution and information
society and tons of ad hoc literature, the educated thought of our
contemporary society continues to be deeply mechanistic!
Why?
Even if the Parmenidean reality is restricted to the natural numbers,
with only the laws of addition and multiplication, we can prove,
assuming our brain are Turing emulable, that the view from inside as
to be Heraclitean.
The problem is not mechanism. The problem is the reductionist
conception of mechanism. I think.
The incompleteness phenomenon does not refute mechanism, like some
have proposed, but it does refute the reductionist conception of
mechanism.
Arithmetic is full of life and dreams.
Best,
Bruno
---Pedro
-snip-
I think it of some interest that I have
previously ( 2006 On
Aristotle’s conception of causality.
General Systems Bulletin 35:
11.) proposed that the Aristotelian 'formal
cause' determines both
'what happens' and 'how it happens', and that
the combination of
this with material cause ('what it happens
to') delivers 'where' it
happens.
(For completeness sake I add that efficient
cause determines only
'when it happens', while final cause points
to 'why it happens'. It
would be quite exciting to find that these
informations were also
carried on separate tracts.)
It would be exciting, as that would seem to refute the
Aristotelean idea
of the four causes as four aspects of all causation. However an
information channel can carry some part of the information from
its
source, which would be a sort of filter or abstraction of the
source.
So, for example, a channel might be sensitive only to the how,
but not
the what, and vice versa. A channel is fundamentally a mapping
of
classes from a source to a sink that through instances that
retain the
mapping (see Barwsie and Seligman, Information Flow: The Logic
of
Distributed Systems). So in this case, a channel sensitive to,
say,
what, would retain the what classifications of the source in a
way
that the sink could use, but perhaps not any other information.
The
channels themselves could still maintain all four aspects of
Aristotelean causation, so Aristotle need not be refuted. This
would
still be very interesting, though. I am unclear what functional
advantage there would be, though we certainly manage to separate
these
causes in much of our thinking (perhaps even, we can't help it).
Cheers,
John
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fis mailing list
Re: [Fis] The Information Flow
Pedro -- The Aristotelian causal categories are conceptual tools, providing
language for distinguishing aspects of a scene. Without them we are liable
to miss certain aspects of nature. For example, Francis Bacon eliminated
final cause from science discourse, explicitly stating that finality can
only apply to human needs. This eliminated much in nature -- in fact those
aspects not useful for the construction of machines. Note that
experimental science -- most of physics -- embodies formal and final causes
in the construction of an experimental setup, eliminating these categories
from the observation of what happens when an observed system is stimulated
by an efficient cause (to be noted only afterward in 'materials and
methods'). Thus, formal and final causes tend to become invisible. This
is valid in physics, or any experimental science which seeks to discover
the possibilities of observed systems, and not to explain actual phenomena
(which are mostly influenced by historically determined nonholonomic
constraints and context (formal causes).
The fact that 'what, how and where' may be transported along one route in a
natural system cannot eliminate them as conceptual tools.
STAN
On Fri, Oct 26, 2012 at 4:32 PM, PEDRO CLEMENTE MARIJUAN FERNANDEZ
pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es wrote:
Dear FISers,
Is it interesting the discussion on wether those informational entities
contain realizations of the Aristotelian scheme of causality or not?
The cell, in my view, conspicuously fails --it would be too artifactual an
scheme. Some parts of the sensory paths of advanced nervous systems seem to
separate some of those causes --but only in a few parts or patches of the
concerned pathway. For instance, in visual processing the what and the
how/where seem to be travelling together undifferentiated along the optic
nerve and are separated --more or less-- after the visual superior
colliculus in the midbrain before discharging onto the visual cortex. The
really big flow of spikes arriving each instant (many millions every few
milisec) are mixed and correlated with themselves and with other top-down
and bottom-up preexisting flows in multiple neural mappings... and further,
when those flows mix with the association areas under the influence of
languaje, then, and only then, all those logic and conceptual
categorizations of human thought are enacted in the ephemeral synaptic
networks.
I am optimistic that a new Heraclitean way of thinking boils down in
network science, neuroinformatics, systems biology, bioinformation etc.
Neither the Parmenidean eliminative fixism of classical reductionists,
nor the Aristotelian organicism of systemicists. Say that this is a
caricature. However you cannot bathe twice in the same river not just
because we all are caught into the universal physical flow of photons and
forces, but for the Heraclitean flux of our own neurons and brains, for
the inner torrents of the aggregated information flows. The same for
whatever cells, societies, etc. and their physical structures for info
transportation.
Either we produce an interesting new vision of the world, finally making
sense of those perennial metaphors among the different (informational)
realms, or information science will continue to be that small portion of
incoherent patches more or less close to information theory or to
artificial intelligence. In spite of decades of bla-bla- about information
revolution and information society and tons of ad hoc literature, the
educated thought of our contemporary society continues to be deeply
mechanistic!
Why?
best wishes
---Pedro
-snip-
I think it of some interest that I have
previously ( 2006 On
Aristotle’s conception of causality.
General Systems Bulletin 35:
11.) proposed that the Aristotelian 'formal
cause' determines both
'what happens' and 'how it happens', and that
the combination of
this with material cause ('what it happens
to') delivers 'where' it
happens.
(For completeness sake I add that efficient
cause determines only
'when it happens', while final cause points
to 'why it happens'. It
would be quite exciting to find that these
informations were also
carried on separate tracts.)
It would be exciting, as that would seem to refute the
Aristotelean idea
of the four causes as four aspects of all causation. However an
information channel can carry some part of the information from
its
source, which would be a sort of filter or abstraction of the
source.
So, for example, a channel might be sensitive only to the how,
but not
the what, and vice versa. A channel is fundamentally a mapping
of
classes from a source to a sink that through instances that
retain the
mapping (see Barwsie and Seligman, Information Flow: The Logic
of
Distributed Systems). So in this case, a channel sensitive to,
say,
what, would retain the what
Re: [Fis] The Information Flow
I really respect all involved … that said-
Can we leave the past for a moment and just try to ask the 10 most important
questions of today.
What are they!
Jesus - this feel like a historical pissing match and is not being really
constructive.
b
On Oct 27, 2012, at 11:34 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote:
On 26 Oct 2012, at 22:32, PEDRO CLEMENTE MARIJUAN FERNANDEZ wrote:
Dear FISers,
Is it interesting the discussion on wether those informational
entities contain realizations of the Aristotelian scheme of
causality or not?
The cell, in my view, conspicuously fails --it would be too
artifactual an scheme. Some parts of the sensory paths of advanced
nervous systems seem to separate some of those causes --but only in
a few parts or patches of the concerned pathway. For instance, in
visual processing the what and the how/where seem to be
travelling together undifferentiated along the optic nerve and are
separated --more or less-- after the visual superior colliculus in
the midbrain before discharging onto the visual cortex. The really
big flow of spikes arriving each instant (many millions every few
milisec) are mixed and correlated with themselves and with other top-
down and bottom-up preexisting flows in multiple neural mappings...
and further, when those flows mix with the association areas under
the influence of languaje, then, and only then, all those logic and
conceptual categorizations of human thought are enacted in the
ephemeral synaptic networks.
I am optimistic that a new Heraclitean way of thinking boils down
in network science, neuroinformatics, systems biology,
bioinformation etc. Neither the Parmenidean eliminative fixism of
classical reductionists, nor the Aristotelian organicism of
systemicists. Say that this is a caricature. However you cannot
bathe twice in the same river not just because we all are caught
into the universal physical flow of photons and forces, but for the
Heraclitean flux of our own neurons and brains, for the inner
torrents of the aggregated information flows. The same for whatever
cells, societies, etc. and their physical structures for info
transportation.
Either we produce an interesting new vision of the world, finally
making sense of those perennial metaphors among the different
(informational) realms, or information science will continue to be
that small portion of incoherent patches more or less close to
information theory or to artificial intelligence. In spite of
decades of bla-bla- about information revolution and information
society and tons of ad hoc literature, the educated thought of our
contemporary society continues to be deeply mechanistic!
Why?
Even if the Parmenidean reality is restricted to the natural numbers,
with only the laws of addition and multiplication, we can prove,
assuming our brain are Turing emulable, that the view from inside as
to be Heraclitean.
The problem is not mechanism. The problem is the reductionist
conception of mechanism. I think.
The incompleteness phenomenon does not refute mechanism, like some
have proposed, but it does refute the reductionist conception of
mechanism.
Arithmetic is full of life and dreams.
Best,
Bruno
---Pedro
-snip-
I think it of some interest that I have
previously ( 2006 On
Aristotle’s conception of causality.
General Systems Bulletin 35:
11.) proposed that the Aristotelian 'formal
cause' determines both
'what happens' and 'how it happens', and that
the combination of
this with material cause ('what it happens
to') delivers 'where' it
happens.
(For completeness sake I add that efficient
cause determines only
'when it happens', while final cause points
to 'why it happens'. It
would be quite exciting to find that these
informations were also
carried on separate tracts.)
It would be exciting, as that would seem to refute the
Aristotelean idea
of the four causes as four aspects of all causation. However an
information channel can carry some part of the information from
its
source, which would be a sort of filter or abstraction of the
source.
So, for example, a channel might be sensitive only to the how,
but not
the what, and vice versa. A channel is fundamentally a mapping
of
classes from a source to a sink that through instances that
retain the
mapping (see Barwsie and Seligman, Information Flow: The Logic
of
Distributed Systems). So in this case, a channel sensitive to,
say,
what, would retain the what classifications of the source in a
way
that the sink could use, but perhaps not any other information.
The
channels themselves could still maintain all four aspects of
Aristotelean causation, so Aristotle need not be refuted. This
would
still be very interesting, though. I am unclear what functional
advantage there would be, though we
Re: [Fis] The Information Flow
Dear FISers,
Is it interesting the discussion on wether those informational entities contain
realizations of the Aristotelian scheme of causality or not?
The cell, in my view, conspicuously fails --it would be too artifactual an
scheme. Some parts of the sensory paths of advanced nervous systems seem to
separate some of those causes --but only in a few parts or patches of the
concerned pathway. For instance, in visual processing the what and the
how/where seem to be travelling together undifferentiated along the optic
nerve and are separated --more or less-- after the visual superior colliculus
in the midbrain before discharging onto the visual cortex. The really big flow
of spikes arriving each instant (many millions every few milisec) are mixed and
correlated with themselves and with other top-down and bottom-up preexisting
flows in multiple neural mappings... and further, when those flows mix with the
association areas under the influence of languaje, then, and only then, all
those logic and conceptual categorizations of human thought are enacted in the
ephemeral synaptic networks.
I am optimistic that a new Heraclitean way of thinking boils down in network
science, neuroinformatics, systems biology, bioinformation etc. Neither the
Parmenidean eliminative fixism of classical reductionists, nor the
Aristotelian organicism of systemicists. Say that this is a caricature. However
you cannot bathe twice in the same river not just because we all are caught
into the universal physical flow of photons and forces, but for the
Heraclitean flux of our own neurons and brains, for the inner torrents of the
aggregated information flows. The same for whatever cells, societies, etc. and
their physical structures for info transportation.
Either we produce an interesting new vision of the world, finally making sense
of those perennial metaphors among the different (informational) realms, or
information science will continue to be that small portion of incoherent
patches more or less close to information theory or to artificial intelligence.
In spite of decades of bla-bla- about information revolution and information
society and tons of ad hoc literature, the educated thought of our contemporary
society continues to be deeply mechanistic!
Why?
best wishes
---Pedro
-snip-
I think it of some interest that I have
previously ( 2006 On
Aristotle’s conception of causality.
General Systems Bulletin 35:
11.) proposed that the Aristotelian 'formal
cause' determines both
'what happens' and 'how it happens', and that
the combination of
this with material cause ('what it happens
to') delivers 'where' it
happens.
(For completeness sake I add that efficient
cause determines only
'when it happens', while final cause points
to 'why it happens'. It
would be quite exciting to find that these
informations were also
carried on separate tracts.)
It would be exciting, as that would seem to refute the
Aristotelean idea
of the four causes as four aspects of all causation. However an
information channel can carry some part of the information from
its
source, which would be a sort of filter or abstraction of the
source.
So, for example, a channel might be sensitive only to the how,
but not
the what, and vice versa. A channel is fundamentally a mapping
of
classes from a source to a sink that through instances that
retain the
mapping (see Barwsie and Seligman, Information Flow: The Logic
of
Distributed Systems). So in this case, a channel sensitive to,
say,
what, would retain the what classifications of the source in a
way
that the sink could use, but perhaps not any other information.
The
channels themselves could still maintain all four aspects of
Aristotelean causation, so Aristotle need not be refuted. This
would
still be very interesting, though. I am unclear what functional
advantage there would be, though we certainly manage to separate
these
causes in much of our thinking (perhaps even, we can't help it).
Cheers,
John
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Re: [Fis] The Information Flow
Interesting Software Best Bill http://www.kurzweilai.net/a-biology-friendly-robot-programming-language?utm_source=KurzweilAI+Daily+Newsletterutm_campaign=fb29857305-UA-946742-1utm_medium=email http://parpar.jbei.org ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
Re: [Fis] The Information Flow
Dear FISers, Continuing with the comments on the how versus the what, it is an important topic in mammalian (vertebrate) nervous systems. They are subtended by mostly separate neural tracts (though partially interconnected), it is the dorsal stream, specialized in the how where, and the ventral stream stream about the what. In the case of C elegans, endowed with one of the simplest invertebrate nervous systems, I do not know whether the previous distinction makes sense there. The what, the identity of the object is in this case heavily dependendent on the genetic wiring of axons and on specialized molecular receptors... But whatever the case, both the what and the how/where resolve in flows of electrical discharges through a series of neural networks. They are but the same flux of evanescent stuff, several hundred of spikes flowing for a few seconds. About the deterministic outlook of both models, the cellular and the neuronal, I think there is an important problem of bulk complexity non tractable at the time being. Putting in stochastic form those hundreds of coupled differential equations with the whole cellular kinetics becomes too tough a demand. During these weeks we have also witnessed the resolution of the ENCODE project, what looks quite worryings is the highly specialized nature of the numeorus results, almost unreadable except for people with a strong background in bioinformatics and systems biology. People outside the field, theoretical biologists for instance, will have a very difficult time. Are we witnessing the birth of another esoteric realm like particle physics? Bad news for bio-information afficionados indeed. These milestones, and similar ones during very recent years (in network science specially), whatever their virtues and defects, have dramatically altered our information science panorama. One of the things we can do, in my view, is to carefully explore the concepts related to information flows. Cellularly, Neurally, Socially, the respective information items generally travel in waves, along channels that self-modify with the ongoing flux, and continuously alter the respective material/informational structures in communication. Does it make sense contemplating the neuron as an information flow entity? I think so. And the people within an organization too. Somehow, the challenge is to bring a corpus of fundamental ideas in line with the complex communication experiences of our time (and of all times!) best greetings ---Pedro ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
Re: [Fis] The Information Flow
Pedro -- it is of interest to me that
On Sun, Oct 21, 2012 at 3:38 PM, PEDRO CLEMENTE MARIJUAN FERNANDEZ
pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es wrote:
Dear FISers,
Continuing with the comments on the how versus the what, it is an
important topic in mammalian (vertebrate) nervous systems. They are
subtended by mostly separate neural tracts (though partially
interconnected), it is the dorsal stream, specialized in the how where,
and the ventral stream stream about the what.
-snip-
I think it of some interest that I have previously ( 2006 On Aristotle’s
conception of causality. General Systems Bulletin 35: 11.) proposed that
the Aristotelian 'formal cause' determines both 'what happens' and 'how it
happens', and that the combination of this with material cause ('what it
happens to') delivers 'where' it happens.
(For completeness sake I add that efficient cause determines only 'when it
happens', while final cause points to 'why it happens'. It would be quite
exciting to find that these informations were also carried on separate
tracts.)
STAN
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Re: [Fis] The Information Flow
Good point, Stan. I think that it can be used to create a notion of 'knowing that', but it will require at least another level. I review some ways to do this in Explaining Biological Functionality: Is Control Theory Enough? South African Journal of Philosophy. 2011, 30(4): 53-62. The main references are more directly related to 'knowing that', but I would see 'knowing that' as fulfilling a particular functional role,. and requiring something like explicit representations, both of which I deal with in the paper. I can see that there is a further paper to be written that takes the step to the specific case of 'knowing that'. Cheers, John At 03:38 PM 2012/10/15, Stanley N Salthe wrote: On that curious definition of knowledge, it looks like 'knowing how' rather than 'knowing that'. STAN On Mon, Oct 15, 2012 at 11:56 AM, Pedro C. Marijuan pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es wrote: Dear FIS Colleagues, Thanks to Zhao Chuan for the Computer Poem/Song. It is a soft way to retake our discussions. These weeks there have been a couple of important achievements in the bio-information field. On the one side, the first 'complete' model of a prokaryotic cell (A Whole-Cell Computational Model Predicts Phenotype from Genotype, by Karr et al., Cell, 150, 389-401, 2012). On the other, there was the report of another 'complete' scheme, that of the C. elegans nervous system, now at the level of individual synaptic contacts, which was able to explain the mating behavior of the worm (The Connectome of a Decision-Making Neural Network, by Jarrell et al., Science, 337, 437-444, 2012). It contained several references to the information flow through interneurons and sensorimotor circuits, and a very curious definition of knowledge (as the set of activity weights in an adjacency matrix of a neural network, upon which the network's input-output function in part depends...). Both papers are very interesting, relatively consistent with each other, and I think both represent symbolic milestones in the bio-information field. The point on information flows left me thinking on the larger perspective beyond single information items that we rarely focus on. Actually the first Shannonian information metaphor was about sources and channels --wasn't it? Particularly thinking on social information matters, how many aspects of contemporary life relate to the maintenance of the information flows intertwining and directing the economic flows. No doubt that the forces of communication have definitely won the upper hand upon the forces of production . Somehow, Zhao Chuan's poem is but a celebration of the central role that computers have come to play in the gigantic information flows of our time. best wishes --Pedro -- - Pedro C. Marijuán Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group Instituto Aragonés de Ciencias de la Salud Centro de Investigación Biomédica de Aragón (CIBA) Avda. San Juan Bosco, 13, planta X 50009 Zaragoza, Spain Tfno. +34 976 71 3526 ( 6818) pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/ - ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis Professor John Collier colli...@ukzn.ac.za Philosophy and Ethics, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban 4041 South Africa T: +27 (31) 260 3248 / 260 2292 F: +27 (31) 260 3031 http ://web.ncf.ca/collier ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
Re: [Fis] The Information Flow
How about Knowing Through… How can we embody a neural network/learning system through multi-modal sensing? b Bill Seaman Professor, Department of Art, Art History Visual Studies DUKE UNIVERSITY 114 b East Duke Building Box 90764 Durham, NC 27708, USA +1-919-684-2499 http://billseaman.com/ http://fds.duke.edu/db/aas/AAH/faculty/william.seaman http://www.dibs.duke.edu/research/profiles/98-william-seaman On Oct 15, 2012, at 2:38 PM, Stanley N Salthe ssal...@binghamton.edu wrote: On that curious definition of knowledge, it looks like 'knowing how' rather than 'knowing that'. STAN On Mon, Oct 15, 2012 at 11:56 AM, Pedro C. Marijuan pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es wrote: Dear FIS Colleagues, Thanks to Zhao Chuan for the Computer Poem/Song. It is a soft way to retake our discussions. These weeks there have been a couple of important achievements in the bio-information field. On the one side, the first 'complete' model of a prokaryotic cell (A Whole-Cell Computational Model Predicts Phenotype from Genotype, by Karr et al., Cell, 150, 389-401, 2012). On the other, there was the report of another 'complete' scheme, that of the C. elegans nervous system, now at the level of individual synaptic contacts, which was able to explain the mating behavior of the worm (The Connectome of a Decision-Making Neural Network, by Jarrell et al., Science, 337, 437-444, 2012). It contained several references to the information flow through interneurons and sensorimotor circuits, and a very curious definition of knowledge (as the set of activity weights in an adjacency matrix of a neural network, upon which the network's input-output function in part depends...). Both papers are very interesting, relatively consistent with each other, and I think both represent symbolic milestones in the bio-information field. The point on information flows left me thinking on the larger perspective beyond single information items that we rarely focus on. Actually the first Shannonian information metaphor was about sources and channels --wasn't it? Particularly thinking on social information matters, how many aspects of contemporary life relate to the maintenance of the information flows intertwining and directing the economic flows. No doubt that the forces of communication have definitely won the upper hand upon the forces of production . Somehow, Zhao Chuan's poem is but a celebration of the central role that computers have come to play in the gigantic information flows of our time. best wishes --Pedro -- - Pedro C. Marijuán Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group Instituto Aragonés de Ciencias de la Salud Centro de Investigación Biomédica de Aragón (CIBA) Avda. San Juan Bosco, 13, planta X 50009 Zaragoza, Spain Tfno. +34 976 71 3526 ( 6818) pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/ - ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
Re: [Fis] The Information Flow (From Bob Ulanowicz)
(From Bob Ulanowicz) * Dear Pedro, I am not familiar with either model. I am made uneasy, however, by the deterministic nature of the model descriptions. My concern is that networks in general are metaphors for the amalgamation of constraint and indeterminacy. There are, of course, degenerate forms of networks that are deterministic, or almost so. Ontogeny in general is almost deterministic and that would be reflected in their corresponding network descriptors. My worry is that by focusing upon these degenerate cases we lose sight of the fact that in living systems considered more broadly (e.g., ecological, social and economic systems), the indeterminate plays a larger and *obligatory* role in the persistence of the system. The best, Bob - End forwarded message - ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
[Fis] The Information Flow
Dear FIS Colleagues, Thanks to Zhao Chuan for the Computer Poem/Song. It is a soft way to retake our discussions. These weeks there have been a couple of important achievements in the bio-information field. On the one side, the first 'complete' model of a prokaryotic cell (A Whole-Cell Computational Model Predicts Phenotype from Genotype, by Karr et al., Cell, 150, 389-401, 2012). On the other, there was the report of another 'complete' scheme, that of the C. elegans nervous system, now at the level of individual synaptic contacts, which was able to explain the mating behavior of the worm (The Connectome of a Decision-Making Neural Network, by Jarrell et al., Science, 337, 437-444, 2012). It contained several references to the information flow through interneurons and sensorimotor circuits, and a very curious definition of knowledge (as the set of activity weights in an adjacency matrix of a neural network, upon which the network's input-output function in part depends...). Both papers are very interesting, relatively consistent with each other, and I think both represent symbolic milestones in the bio-information field. The point on information flows left me thinking on the larger perspective beyond single information items that we rarely focus on. Actually the first Shannonian information metaphor was about sources and channels --wasn't it? Particularly thinking on social information matters, how many aspects of contemporary life relate to the maintenance of the information flows intertwining and directing the economic flows. No doubt that the forces of communication have definitely won the upper hand upon the forces of production . Somehow, Zhao Chuan's poem is but a celebration of the central role that computers have come to play in the gigantic information flows of our time. best wishes --Pedro -- - Pedro C. Marijuán Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group Instituto Aragonés de Ciencias de la Salud Centro de Investigación Biomédica de Aragón (CIBA) Avda. San Juan Bosco, 13, planta X 50009 Zaragoza, Spain Tfno. +34 976 71 3526 ( 6818) pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/ - ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
